He spends a good deal of his time here completing a paper he is preparing to deliver at a conference in Yellowknife, where he'll be headed after leaving us, post-visit with us over the holidays. We'd gone over to visit with his sister and niece a few days earlier; our daughter and granddaughter, and enjoyed ourselves being together, a rare opportunity since our children are dispersed across the country.

Yesterday we'd gone out to the ravine for a very cold ramble. We dressed in protective layers against the cold and the wind, but at minus-17 degrees Celsius and a sharp wind, it was cold indeed. No one else appeared to be out on the last day of 2013, but us. Until we came across Lily, a pure-white German Shepherd we've known for years, out for a brief walk with her human companion, a man as unusual as she is, but for height, not colouration.

I would have felt more comfortable if I hadn't kept pulling off my warm, insulated mitten to grapple with peanuts in my double-gloved right hand, depositing them as usual for the squirrels and the crows which were also following our progress on this bitterly cold day. When we eventually returned home it took quite awhile for the fingers on that hand to feel normal again.

But it was a beautiful day regardless, overcast but radiant with a thick coverlet of snow.

For the second time in a week our son prepared dinner, a vegetable curry with black beans, and it was excellent. He had also prepared an appetizer; chopped onion stirred-fried in olive oil, then crumbled goat cheese added to it, and baby spinach leaves. The result was spectacularly fragrant and delicious.

We watched a film last night, a Norwegian film about a train engineer who had just retired from his position with the railway, and it was quite the film. Witty and stoic, the reminiscences of mostly elderly people and the way they manage their lives in a northern environment. A quietly touching film, titled O'Horten, starring the actor Bard Owe.

And then we rounded out the evening to midnight with a hilarious game of Pictionary -- I just happen to be the odd-person-out in this family incapable of sketching really good pictographs.